Oil Spills in California

This report presents an exploration of oil spills in California recorded in 2008, including an interactive map and chloreopath of oil spills illustrating the number of oil spills in each county.

Summary

In this report, I am analyzing the documented oil spills that occurred in California in 2008. I created an interactive map that illustrates each individual oil spill in every county throughout the state. A chloreopath shows the density of the number of oil spills in each county, which highlights Los Angeles County as having the greatest number of oil spills in 2008. Data for CA oil spills is from CAOpenData, Department of Fish and Wildlife.

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#read in the data
ca_counties <- st_read(here("_posts", "2021-02-22-interactive_map", "ca_counties", "CA_Counties_TIGER2016.shp"))

Reading layer `CA_Counties_TIGER2016' from data source `/Users/annatalken/Desktop/Bren Master Program/Year 1/_Winter 2021/ESM 244/Personal Website/talken-website/_posts/2021-02-22-interactive_map/ca_counties/CA_Counties_TIGER2016.shp' using driver `ESRI Shapefile'
Simple feature collection with 58 features and 17 fields
geometry type:  MULTIPOLYGON
dimension:      XY
bbox:           xmin: -13857270 ymin: 3832931 xmax: -12705030 ymax: 5162404
projected CRS:  WGS 84 / Pseudo-Mercator

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# Wrangling

ca_subset <- ca_counties %>% 
  select(NAME, ALAND) %>% #keeping only county name and land area, but since it is a simple feature object, it keeps the spatial information (column geometry)
  rename(county_name = NAME, land_area = ALAND)


# Add the oil spill data

oil_spill <-st_read(here("_posts", "2021-02-22-interactive_map", "Oil_Spill_Incident_Tracking_%5Bds394%5D-shp", "Oil_Spill_Incident_Tracking_%5Bds394%5D.shp"))

Reading layer `Oil_Spill_Incident_Tracking_%5Bds394%5D' from data source `/Users/annatalken/Desktop/Bren Master Program/Year 1/_Winter 2021/ESM 244/Personal Website/talken-website/_posts/2021-02-22-interactive_map/Oil_Spill_Incident_Tracking_%5Bds394%5D-shp/Oil_Spill_Incident_Tracking_%5Bds394%5D.shp' using driver `ESRI Shapefile'
Simple feature collection with 3237 features and 13 fields
geometry type:  POINT
dimension:      XY
bbox:           xmin: -13830400 ymin: 3761605 xmax: -12757590 ymax: 5156169
projected CRS:  WGS 84 / Pseudo-Mercator

Interactive Map of Oil Spills in CA in 2008

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tmap_mode(mode = "view") 
  
tm_shape(ca_subset) +
  tm_fill("land_area", palette = "BuGn") +
  tm_shape(oil_spill) +
  tm_dots(col = "black")

Chloreopath of Oil Spills In CA in 2008

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# finding number of oil spills per county

ca_oil_spills <- ca_subset %>% 
  st_join(oil_spill)

oil_counts <- ca_oil_spills %>% 
  count(county_name)

ggplot(data = oil_counts) +
  geom_sf(aes(fill = n), color = "black", size = 0.2) +
  scale_fill_gradientn(colors = c("lightgray", "yellow", "red")) +
  theme_minimal() +
  labs(title = "Number of oil spills across counties in California in 2008",
       fill = "Number of oil spills")